Chance by Nancy Springer Page A

the horse’s rump. The steed was moon-white, and comely, and splendidly caparisoned, and mannerly beyond belief: it bowed for Wirral’s mounting so that he need not pass his foot near the lady. Then, when its riders were settled, it sprang away into the air.
    With the strange excitement pounding in her blood, Xanthea was not frightened. With her arms around Wirral’s waist and the golden mask keeping the cold rush of air from her face, with peacock plumes trailing behind her and her peacock-blue gown flowing down around her feet, she rode. She looked down often to see how strange her father’s land lay far below, moonlit and starlit and rushing away beneath the horse’s hooves. The steed flew and bore her, but she felt as if she herself were flying, she, Xanthea the warrior, the falcon wings straining on her helm, flying away from the place where she had been kept prisoner, where someday she would return.… The horse had no wings. Yet it flew, so smoothly that it seemed at one with the still air, the night, the moon.
    Then the world of white came to an edge; Wirral forest lay below, and stretched dark as far as Xanthea could see. The horse flew on until the snow-covered fields lay far behind; all was darkness below, dark branches so massed, so striving that only jumbled bits of white showed between them like drunken stars fallen into a pit.
    â€œThe size of it!” Xanthea whispered. She spoke only for herself; she had not thought the other could hear her.
    â€œWirral is vast,” he replied, his voice hushed.
    It seemed immense as the sea to Xanthea, and though the horse flew swiftly she could see no end of it. But after the passing of a time, without warning the horse swooped down toward the trees, and Xanthea almost screamed, clutching at the stranger in front of her. The next moment, branches rattled against her mask. Then with dizzying suddenness she was under the canopy of boughs instead of above it, and the horse came to a stop, standing on the snowy ground. The wolf-masked stranger swung his booted foot over the white steed’s neck and slipped lithely to the ground. Then he reached up for Xanthea’s waist and as lightly lifted her down.
    Dawn was coming on. Pale light drifted down like fine snow from around the stars. Lady Xanthea and her escort stood side by side in the midst of wilderness. The horse walked away.
    â€œTell me what you see,” the stranger said.
    She stood staring about her at ferns and deadwood and towering trees, for she had never seen true forest before, or even woodlot, but only the tame walled garden of her father’s fortress.
    â€œI see …” She blinked, for she had seen the white horse turn to a white squirrel and leap up the trunk of a massive oak.
    â€œTake off your mask,” said the stranger, “and feel the air, and breathe deep of it, and see.”
    Dawn’s light had turned from white to golden. Xanthea regarded her companion steadily. “You take off yours also,” she said.
    He did so, and he was the most beautiful man she had ever seen or envisioned in dream.
    His eyes were wild, and burning with a soft fire, and fixed on her. His hair was the color of a red fox in summer. His brows were like the wings of an eagle; his face, a warrior angel’s. When he moved, he was the deer for grace and the oak for strength, and when he stood still, as he was, looking at her.… She saw nothing but that face, those eyes. Ardent eyes, brown as a deer’s, and as soft, yet fierce as the yellow eyes of a wolf.
    His wild beauty frightened her as nothing else could have; it made her feel small inside, and cold, with all the heat in her blood chilled. She took a step back. “You said you were ugly,” she whispered.
    â€œAs ugly as you,” the man agreed. With both hands he reached out and lifted the golden mask by gentle fingertips. Peacock plumes rustled soft as the whisper of death, coming away, and Xanthea